Forum for Holocaust Studies

Introduction to the Historic Photographs of Gustav
Metzger
Alison Jones

Gustav Metzger is an artist whose body of work the 'Historic Photographs'
has incorporated giant press photographs of catastrophic events of
the 20th century; the Holocaust and Nazi rallies as well as the Vietnam
war, the Arab-Israeli conflict, terrorism and environmental destruction.
It is difficult not to read the whole of Metzger's artistic output
in the context of his own life which has intersected tragically with
some of the century's catastrophic historical moments. The connection
is particularly apparent in the later works which explore the Jewish
subject and 20th century history. The aim of this introduction is
to give some biographical details and point to connections between
the artist's personal history and world history, and reflect on the
transformation of subjective experience into artworks which seek
to avoid the purely autobiographical.

Gustav Metzger was born in 1926 into a Jewish-Polish family in
Nürmberg,
the notorious centre for Nazi rallies. As Nazi persecution of Jews intensified
and his father and sisters were arrested, he and a brother were evacuated
in 1939 to England through the Kindertransport scheme. His parents
along with
other members of the family died in Poland during the course of the war.
Amazingly his 2 sisters managed to escape from Poland and made
their way to England and
eventually ending up in Palestine.

In 1942 Metzger worked as a furniture-maker in Leeds where he encountered
the work of sculptor Henry Moore and other contemporary artists.
At the same time he became interested in revolutionary politics and
was introduced to the work of Wilhelm Reich. He worked as a gardener
and in 1944 he moved to Bristol and lived in a commune of Anarchists
and Trotskyists. He decided to become a sculptor, and meeting Moore
at the National Gallery, asked to become his assistant. He followed
Moore's advice that it would be better for him to go to art school
to study life-drawing.

Metzger studied at various art schools in Cambridge, London, Antwerp
and Oxford. The painter David Bomberg, who was also Jewish, taught
Metzger and was influential in his development. He travelled in Europe
with a grant and exhibited paintings in group exhibitions in London
at the Ben Uri gallery, the Whitechapel, and the Berkeley Galleries
whilst working as a labourer on and off until 1953.

He moved to Kings Lynn and worked as a junk dealer, discovering
the 'This is Tomorrow' exhibition of British artists and architects
at the Whitechapel Gallery which he described as one of the deepest
art experiences of his life. He showed his support by hiring a shop
to show posters by the artists in the window. Later he organised
a modest exhibition of work by some of the artists in the show.

He became a founder member of Kings Lynn CND and took part in the
1959 Aldermaston March.

In 1959 Metzger wrote a manifesto 'Auto-destructive Art' and connections
have been drawn between this and the ideas of Bakunin regarding the
dialectical relationship between creation and destruction. From these
ideas Metzger developed an 'aesthetics of revulsion' which he has
referred to many times throughout his career. Self-destruction was
built into the art as the mirror of a system careering towards annihilation.
He describes his Auto-destructive art 'as a desperate last-minute
subversive political weapon...an attack on the capitalist system...(an
attack also on art dealers and collectors who manipulate modern art
for profit.') 1

He abandoned painting in favour of using everyday objects taken
from the real world - cardboard packing cases Cardboards,
newspapers, polythene bags of fabric scraps from garment factories.
The 'readymade' art object, as first proposed by Marcel Duchamp,
in Gustav Metzger's hands emphasised the social dimension. The 'readymade'
objects contained within themselves both a demonstration of the machine
age's creative potential and a critique of the wastage of consumerism.

In 1961 Metzger was jailed for civil disobedience with the Committee
of 100, the anti-nuclear war group formed with the philosopher Bertrand
Russell.

In a statement made to the court before he was taken to jail Metzger
made the following unusually personal statement;

I came to this country from Germany when 12 years old, my parents
being Polish Jews, and I am grateful to the government for bringing
me over. My parents disappeared in 1943 and I would have shared their
fate. But the situation is now far more barbaric than Buchenwald,
for there can be absolute obliteration at any moment. I have no other
choice than to assert my right to live, and we have chosen, in this
committee, a method of fighting which is the opposite of war - the
principle of total non-violence. (2)

In 1961 on the South Bank in London he painted hydrochloric acid
onto nylon canvasses wearing a gas mask and protective clothing,
so that eventually the canvas disintegrated
South
Bank Demonstration. The demonstration
was of an artwork being simultaneously created and destroyed. His
second manifesto on Auto-Destructive Art stated 'Auto-destructive
art re-enacts the obsession with destruction, the pummelling to which
individuals and masses are subjected...Auto-destructive art mirrors
the compulsive perfectionism of arms manufacture - polishing to destruction
point.' (3)

The language and metaphors Metzger uses clearly have reference to
the military machinery of the capitalist state. Writing about Metzger's
performance, Kristine Stiles describes the temporal structuring and
timing of 'South Bank Demonstration' as symbolic of the artist's
personal relationship to the Nazi gas chambers.

Metzger formulated his theory precisely 20 years after he was sent
to England as a child of 12 in 1939, following his family's arrest
by the Gestapo in Nuremburg. 20 seconds then is a temporal analog
for the time it took to destroy his personal world by killing his
family; 20 years, the time of gestation in his own auto-transformation.

Temporality in destruction art is the index of duration that confronts consciousness
with the cycle of construction and destruction manifest in cultural artefacts
and technological objects as well as in nature. This temporality reinscribes
the psyche of the social body with a memory of the finite which must function
as an effective agent in the reaggregation of consciousness around the concept
of survival itself.(4)

Metzger also at this time conceived of a series of public art monuments,
time-based sculptural projects which would be machine-made and would
auto-destruct by the gradual transforming of their material over
time. Typical would be a monument made of steel that would corrode
over time through the action of pollution in the atmosphere.

Metzger was the initiator of the Destruction in Art Symposium in
1966, an event which marked a significant moment in the history of
international exchange amongst artists associated with the counter-culture.
DIAS as it was known was a forum to explore destruction in art and
to relate this destruction to destruction in society. Organised in
the midst of the Vietnam War it brought together Yoko Ono, John Latham,
Hermann Nitsch and the Viennese Actionists (performing outside of
their own country for the first time). Ad Reinhardt also contributed
a statement. As organiser Metzger was prosecuted over Hermann Nitsch's
performance in which he bathed in the blood of a dead animal. Journalists
at the time doubted the morality of using acts of destruction to
protest against destruction.

The attitude to science and technology in Metzger's work is not
undialectical. Creative potential is evidenced in Auto-creative art,
(the counterpart of Auto-destructive art), the most fully realised
examples being his liquid crystal light projections first shown in
1965. Chemicals, machines, the factory assembly of art and computers
were aspects of technology that Metzger explored throughout the 1960s
and 1970s. But the uses to which technology and science are put in
capitalist society have led Metzger to a more pessimistic outlook
on the potential for benign technology in recent years.

His works consciously resisted commodification by the art market,
being public, performative, temporary and critical. Invited to participate
in the group exhibition Art into society/Society into Art at the
ICA in London in 1974, Metzger declined due to his disillusionment
with the increasing commercialisation of art. He contributed a statement
to the exhibition catalogue calling for 'Years without Art 1977-1980,
a period of three years when artists will not produce work, sell
work, permit work to go on exhibition and refuse collaboration with
any part of the publicity machinery of the art world'.(5)

The intention was to rally artists around the idea of protesting
against the commodification of art, and give artists a period in
which to reflect on the uses to which art is put under capitalism,
and the possibilities for art to engage with society. Metzger was
alone in his art strike, and proclaimed that most artists were 'disgusting
bastards'.(6)

He himself withdrew from both art production and the art world and embarked
on years of research which included organising, with Cordula Frohwein, a
conference 'Art in Germany under National Socialism' in London in 1976, the
first to take seriously the subject of National Socialist art, architecture
and design.

Metzger lived in Frankfurt in 1980 and participated in a group exhibition
'Vor dem Abbruch' at the Kunstmuseum, Bern. His installation comprised
photocopies from National Socialist publications listing all the
laws passed against Jews from 1933 up to the last one in 1943.

In the early 1990s Metzger was engaged in art historical research
in the Netherlands, returning to London in 1994. Here he began an
entirely new body of work, the 'Historic Photographs', enlarged press
photographs, presented in an installation. The photographs are all
obscured, cloaked or framed by materials and objects all of which
present obstacles to the usual fleeting consumption of mass media
images.

In Metzger's exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1998
he presented ten photographs of momentous or tragic events of the
twentieth century. The personal and world historical catastrophes
come together in the photographs and it is difficult not to read
the works in the light of the biographical details given in the book
accompanying the exhibition.

The first work in the show was 'The Ramp at Auschwitz, Summer, 1944'
Selection
at Auschwitz, then 'Hitler addressing
the Reichstag in Berlin after the fall of France, July 1940'
Hitler
in the Reichstag.This image is covered
by a formica casing reinforced with steel, the interior is lit
with a neon light. Following this is 'Liquidation of the Warsaw
Ghetto, 19 April, 28 days 1943'
Warsaw
Uprising. This is placed behind a
barrier of rough wooden planks which are slotted at each end
into tall metal casings. The planks recall images of the sides
of the cattle trucks used by the Nazis for mass deportations
by train to the camps.Next is 'Hitler-Youth, Eingeschweisst' Hitler Youth which is entirely encased between
two steel sheets and welded shut.

On the floor after the Hitler-Youth piece is a cloth covering a
huge photograph of the Viennese Jews forced to scrub the pavements,
its title is 'To crawl into - Anschluss, Vienna, March 1938.'
Vienna.
Immediately behind this work is 'To walk into. Massacre on the Mount,
Jerusalem, 8 November 1990.'
Palestinians.
In front of this is hung a heavy curtain behind which the viewer
is invited to go in order to see the image. Forced up close, the
viewer is confronted with the image of Israeli policemen toting automatic
rifles guarding arrested Palestinians lying on the ground.

At the end of the room entirely bricked in by breeze-blocks is a
photograph of a fireman holding a bloodied baby rescued from the
Oklahoma bombing.
Oklahoma
Bombing.

'Jerusalem, Jerusalem' is essentially a curved corridor made from
pvc sheets stretched over wooden frames on which are printed two
photographs of violent acts of the Arab-Israeli conflict in Jerusalem.
They are the first Arab car bomb in 1948
Jerusalem,
and Israelis pushing down the wall dividing Jerusalem
Jerusalem
2 to recapture the old city in 1967,
and the viewer passes between these two images.

The last image, the only colour photograph in the exhibition, is
of Twyford Down
Twyford
Down, deeply scarred by the construction
of a motorway. This is mounted on a concrete slab and enormous caterpillar
tracks.

Many of the press photographs are instantly familiar and some have
been reproduced in the mass media so many times that they could almost
be said to be iconic. But the viewer cannot consume the images in
the customary way because the artist has intervened in the presentation
of the photographs to prevent a straightforward recognition of these
events, and this produces paradoxical effects.

Firstly, several are enlarged so that the physical relationship
of the bodies in the photos to the body of the viewer is accentuated.
Rather than being small images fitting between text in a newspaper
or existing as regular -sized photographs where the people are small,
reduced in scale, some of these images reproduce the people in them
to be closer in scale to a real person standing in front of the photograph.
Instead of being windows onto the world some almost engulf the viewer
in the imagery. In some this causes the grain of the photographic
print to be emphasised to the detriment of the images' intelligibility.

Secondly, viewers are expected to participate in the works by physically
climbing under, or passing behind, materials and objects that cover
the images or interfere with the viewer's ability to look directly
at them. Some works frustrate expectations by obscuring the images
entirely. In order to see some of the works the viewer is also obliged
to perform acts that mirror the acts in the photographs.

Thirdly, the constructions and objects attached to the photographs
have a material resonance that inflects our reading of the images.
The photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto behind wooden planks that recall
the cattle trucks is a case in point.
Fourthly, these photographs are of specific historical events, and are placed
together in a way that provokes an examination both of history and the way
history is transmitted and constructed through photography.

As Auschwitz is the doorway to the section of the exhibition which
contains the Historic Photographs, Adorno's words on the impossibility
of lyric poetry after Auschwitz are invoked, as all the other photographs
are placed physically 'after Auschwitz'. Because Auschwitz is not
chronologically the first of the Historic Photographs, placing it
as the entrance to the exhibition clearly foregrounds the idea that
in the long shadow of the most unimaginable event of the 20th century,
aesthetics are at best a distraction and at worst can be an evil
mechanism of deception. (This theme is underlined by the juxtaposition
of Auschwitz with an image of extreme aestheticisation, as one walks
from Auschwitz into 'Hitler addressing the Reichstag'.)

Entering at the piece 'The Ramp at Auschwitz, Summer 1944' viewers
must walk through an entrance arch onto a crude, creaky wooden ramp.
They pass between two walls and are only permitted to turn in one
direction as steel bars block the other route. The wall facing the
viewer is fly-posted with photocopied sheets of paper which together
make a gigantic blow-up of a photograph of the ramp at Auschwitz.
It shows newly-arrived Hungarian Jews waiting as pairs of high ranking
SS officers oversee the separation of men from women and children.
The spectator must pass along the line. What is happening in the
photograph is hard to make out. Forced physical confinement and closeness
to the grain of the print frustrate attempts to focus on faces as
the grey blobs refuse to cohere and reveal detail. The viewers' physical
performance in line mirrors the queue, walking similar creaking planks
as they are herded along past the enormous image. The optical confusion
generated by the pixelation of the image and the viewers' attempt
to grasp the sense of the scene mirrors the incomprehension of the
arrivals.

Auschwitz, as well as being the nightmare of the 20th century after
which there could be no more poetry (7),
Vienna was
a devastating personal catastrophe for the artist who, after many
years of denial finally acknowledged the fact that his parents probably
met their fate in that place. For Metzger - an escaped Jew - an image
such as this of Jews rounded up and deported to the death camps must
have been agonising documentation. One of the essays in the book
accompanying the exhibition describes the experience of watching
Alan Resnais' film Night and Fog where a camera pans from contemporary
moving images in colour of Polish landscape to stark black and white
documentary photographs of the Nazi death camps as coming close to
what Metzger's relationship to images of the Holocaust might have
been.

This is the memory of Gustav Metzger, a man who lives in a perpetual
state of night and fog, an artist who must constantly interact with
the nightmare of the 20th century. Sent as a boy to England he avoided
the actual experience of the death camps, a fate not shared by his
parents who died there. The most horrendous of Metzger's memories
like Resnais' film , are therefore mostly second hand, yet all too
real, the black and white images quickly passed over in books and
journals brought back to life in the mind's eye. (8)Jerusalem

For those who never witnessed a distant event, photography seems
to be able to bring it closer to them, to bring the truth of an event
to them. But when the distance of an event is reduced through the
various technical media that act over a distance, it brings the event
to us, yet at the same time everything is in some ways more distant
than ever before. Firstly the event is taken out of the context from
which it takes its meaning, and secondly what we are actually brought
closer to is the event's reproduction. What we are brought closer
to is different from the event in itself. What we encounter is the
distance without which an event could never appear: a distance that
comes in the form of an image or a reproduction. So the technical
reproduction of an event whilst appearing to bring it closer also
paradoxically installs a greater distance. There is the obvious mark
of mediation through technical media and distanciation from the event
in the obtrusive photographic grain of the Auschwitz photograph.

There is another aspect of distance in the Reichstag image. Hitler's
events were staged to be photographed, as Leni Riefenstahl writes
of the Nürmburg congress, ' the event was organised in
the manner of a theatrical performance, not only as a popular rally,
but also to provide the material for a propaganda film Everything
was decided with reference to the camera.'(9)Oklahoma
Bombing

In 1934, the year of the Nürmburg rallies, Junker wrote;
'Today wherever an event takes place it is surrounded by a circle of lenses
and microphones and lit up by the flaming explosions of flashbulbs. In many
cases the event itself is completely subordinated to its' transmission; to
a great degree, it has been turned into an object. Thus we have already experienced
political trials, parliamentary meetings, and contests whose whole purpose
is to be the object of a planetary broadcast. The event is neither bound
to its particular space nor to its particular time, since it can be mirrored
anywhere and repeated any number of times These are signs that point to a
great distance.' (10)Trang
Bang: children fleeing. South Vietnam

The Nazis were the most image-obsessed movement in world history
and their effort to impose their vision of the world on the German
nation through the technical media is a matter that has preoccupied
Metzger. The Nürmburg rallies of Metzger's childhood were a
terrifying lesson in the aestheticised politics of the Nazis. The
Hitler-Youth photograph shows the Führer standing to attention
in his gleaming open-topped chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz as it
glides by massed ranks of perfectly choreographed youth and party
members all with their arms raised in the Nazi salute.
The image orgies of the Third Reich are entombed in cold industrial casings,
the Reichstag behind Formica, an internal neon light blinds the viewers preventing
them from seeing, the Hitler-youth are entirely welded shut
Welding of Historic Photographs between two sheets of cold
rolled steel. What might the intention here be? Metzger was determined to debate
the art of the Nazis when he organised the conference Art in Germany under
National Socialism. He encountered in German art historians an unwillingness
to deal with or to try to understand the qualities of Nazi art. Does the artist
want us to consider the Nazis and their epic manipulation of the technical
media as petrified, sealed away, finished? The continuation of fascistic behaviour
within the rest of the historic photographs would suggest otherwise. Might
the Führer's orchestration of events as spectacle be most objectionable
to Metzger as the most blatant expression of the malignant effect of technical
reproduction?

The photograph of the Jewish boy being arrested in the Warsaw Ghetto
comes from the photo album compiled by the Nazi commander personally
responsible for the liquidation of the ghetto. What is outside this
image of catastrophe is the recording of the event, the setting up
of an apparatus, the focussing of an artificial eye, the setting
of the shutter speed without all of which this event could never
appear to the world as an image.

As the mass media expands, it correspondingly increases the methods
and means by which the world and its peoples are further objectified.
In 'Damaged Nature, Auto-destructive Art' Metzger writes that moral
disengagement is fostered by the mass media. 'No-one can sustain
a moral outrage against the onslaught of the media. When people eat,
watching executions ' (11) .
Jerusalem He
alludes to the way the mass media turns historical catastrophe into
an object for mass consumption, in the worst cases for prurient entertainment.
To paraphrase Benjamin on photography, 'it has turned the struggle
against misery into an object of consumption. In many cases indeed
its political significance has been limited to converting revolutionary
reflexes, insofar as these occurred within the bourgeoisie, into
themes of entertainment and amusement which can be fitted without
much difficulty into the cabaret life of a large city.'(12)Jerusalem

Benjamin regarded the relationship between industrialisation and
technological revolution, mechanical reproduction and its role in
the creation of masses, specifically with relation to the Nazis,
as something that warranted urgent investigation: 'The violation
of the masses, whom fascism with its Führer cult forces to its
knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which
is pressed into the production of ritual values'. (13)Jerusalem
2

In the ongoing drive to war in the contemporary world the relationship
between the technical media and technical warfare can be as close
in liberal democracies as it was under the Nazis. For Baudrillard
the technology of modern warfare and the transmission of its representation
go hand in hand. The representation of war on television is more
important than events on the ground, a radically distanced, technically
controlled, eminently 'cool' post-modern optic which, in the doing,
becomes an instrument of war itself. (14)

'To Crawl into; Anschluss, Vienna' is an enlarged photograph of
the Viennese Jews scrubbing the pavements, surrounded by a jeering
crowd of onlookers. It is placed on the floor and covered with a
cloth. To see the whole photograph viewers must get down on their
knees, put the cloth over themselves and crawl about on top of the
picture. This act is psychologically uncomfortable: you must stand
on top of already downtrodden people, you crawl over their bodies,
and you must also get into the same position physically that the
Jews were forced into. The viewer is asked to perform empathetically
and yet disrespectfully by climbing over with their shoes on. The
viewer's body becomes intimately implicated in the image through
his or her body, not via a disembodied eye.

The photograph juxtaposed here is 'To walk into: Massacre on the
Mount.' To see the image one must get behind a large rough cloth
hanging a few inches in front of the photograph. Getting behind the
cloth the viewer is forced up close to an image of Israeli policemen
brandishing automatic weapons.

First in 'Anschluss' we walk over the Jews. Then over fifty years
later in 'Massacre on the Mount' we are menaced by Israelis walking
over Palestinians. The physical engagement which forces the viewer
to perform both a violation and then to be themselves intimidated,
works against the distancing effect of the events' technical reproduction.

Metzger asserts, 'Never before has the body been so threatened as
now. The body is taken on by an emergent ever-enlarging assembly
of instrumentation, surrounded by surrogates who replicate and replace
the body. The human being is locked into a technoid double and becomes
a mere template of that machinal self.' (15) In
the Historic Photographs he puts the body at the centre of the experience
of these events, and does it through the event performed by the viewer.

The treatment of Jews and Arabs in the Historic Photographs is complex
and allows for contradictory interpretations. This contrasts with
the way that fascist ideology impresses one single idea of the image
on the masses. Walter Benjamin writes about there being a kind of
transmission which is itself catastrophic, and that is the transmission
that impresses the single meaning on a work of art or image. He was
referring specifically to the Nazi's totalitarian world view, but
it could equally well apply to the more subtle view of history impressed
upon us by the mass media of social and political catastrophe endlessly
piling up one after the other. Palestinian terrorism is contrasted
was Israeli domination - but does this mean that we are to assume
catastrophe just goes on, catastrophes piling up one after the other?

'The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency'
in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain
to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.
Then we shall clearly recognise that it is our task to bring about
a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in
our struggle against fascism. It has a chance because in the name
of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current
amazement that the things we are still experiencing are 'still' possible
in the 20th Century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the
beginning of knowledge - unless it is the knowledge that the view
of history which gives rise to it is untenable.' (16)

The viewer is presented with a series of catastrophic historical
events which constitute an ongoing state of emergency which are endlessly
portrayed through the mass media as outside our control. By presenting
these photographs in a different way in the gallery, Metzger leaves
the viewer excluded and frustrated, forced to perform a mimicry of
events, pushed to think differently about these events.

Metzger writes
that one of the reasons he obscured the photographs is that 'When
confronted with nothing it is difficult to find one's
bearings. This is the state in which I seek to place the viewer.'(17) Instead
of allowing viewers to be passive consumers of objects of misery,
Metzger forces them to produce their own meaning.

To conclude this section with the photograph of Twyford Down taken
in 1998 as the last historic photograph of the 20th Century is to
lay down a challenge to the idea that the mass media makes morons
of us, by its excessive overload of ongoing catastrophe that dulls
our moral outrage at the injustices of the world. After 20 years
of futile protesting through legal channels at the extension of the
M3 motorway through Twyford Down, protestors engaged in a direct
action campaign which was spectacularly committed. Protestors threw
themselves down in front of trucks and endured the heavy-handed tactics
of the security men deployed at the site by the local government.
5,000 protestors took part in an illegal occupation of the motorway
and Twyford Down was the first major direct action against road-building,
inspiring many subsequent campaigns that have challenged the destruction
of the environment and communities to make way for capitalist expansion.

The massive caterpillar tracks that the image is mounted on are
a threatening presence, the wheels of environmental destruction and
of 20th century warfare and a crude physical reminder of the body's
vulnerability in the face of the state's crushing machinery.

The Historic Photographs allow for many strands of the debates about
history and the role of photography in the transmission and construction
of history to come together. Photography in the mass media is deeply
implicated in the course of history, and instrumental in how we understand
our own role in world catastrophic events. Whilst appearing to bring
people together through the reduction of distance, the technical
media in fact serve to install a distance of increasing objectification
and saturation. In this way our humanity is violated by a view of
history as endless catastrophe which serves to generate indifference.

Metzger wants us to feel oppressed, pushed and manipulated both
psychologically and physically in his installations, to be forced
to perform hollow mimicries of the century's catastrophes with our
body, to be crawling on our knees, to imagine being shut behind the
wooden planks of the cattle truck.These acts run the risk of being
an affront to the actual suffering of the real victims of history,
becoming merely a playful performance
in a bourgeois 'box of deceit' (18) as Metzger
has described art galleries. If we are privileged not to feel the
fear of the illegal, the marginalized, those who are discriminated
against by the fact that we live under liberal democracy, that catastrophe
is always elsewhere, perhaps the awareness of that luxury of being
able to enjoy the frisson of the other's oppression, might be another
weapon in Metzger's arsenal , to make the comfortable uncomfortable
about their relative comfort in a world in a permanent state of emergency
.

1

Gustav Metzger quoted in John A Walker, 'Message from the
Margin, John A Walker tracks down Gustav Metzger', Art Monthly,
no. 190, October 1995, p.15.

Gustav Metzger quoted in Wilson, A, 'Papa what did you do
when the nazis built the concentration camps? My dear they
never told us anything', Gustav Metzger, Damaged Nature, Auto-Destructive
Art, Coracle @ workfortheeyetodo, London, 1996, p73.

Andrew Wilson discusses the work of Metzger in terms of its
relationship to Adorno's Negative Dialectics in his essay 'Gustav
Metzger: A Thinking against Thinking.' in Gustav Metzger: Retrospectives.
Museum of Modern Art Papers Vol 3, Cole, I, (ed), MOMA, Oxford,
1999, p.73.